Computer-Based vs Paper: What Changed and Why It Matters

When the NSW Department of Education moved the Selective High School test onto the Janison platform in 2025, a lot of parents heard about the change and decided it wasn't a big deal. "Same exam, just on a computer." I heard this phrase from three different families in a single week last Term. I need to push back on it, because it's wrong, and the consequences of getting it wrong are real.

Your child is not going to sit the same exam on a screen that they would have sat on paper. They are going to sit a different exam, because the delivery medium changes how questions are experienced, how time is spent, and where kids lose marks. Screen-based testing is its own thing. Let me show you what actually happens.

What Janison is, briefly

Janison is an Australian assessment platform used by ACER and a number of other testing bodies to deliver digital exams. Your child logs in on exam day, the test loads in a locked-down browser window, and they work through the sections one at a time. They see a question, choose an answer, click next. They can flag questions to return to later. At the end of each section, a timer expires and the platform moves them on.

This sounds simple. For an adult who uses computers daily, it basically is. For a 10-year-old who uses a Chromebook at school for typing and an iPad at home for games, it introduces a whole category of friction that their teachers and parents underestimate.

Where kids actually lose marks on computer-based exams

Every student who has sat a full-length digital practice with me has lost at least some marks to format-related issues the first time. Here are the specific problems, ranked by how often I see them.

1. Slower reading on screen

This is the single biggest issue. Reading on screen is about 15–25% slower than reading on paper for most primary-aged children, according to a stack of educational research. The reasons are practical: slightly worse contrast, slight screen glare, the need to scroll rather than scan, and the way eyes fatigue faster on a backlit display.

For the Reading section of the Selective test, this is brutal. Your child has 45 minutes to work through multiple passages and roughly 30 questions. If their reading speed is 15% slower on screen, they're effectively losing 7 minutes of working time they don't realise they've lost. That's 4–5 questions they rushed or didn't finish.

The fix is practice, but specifically practice on screens, not on paper. A child who has only read passages on paper will be slower on exam day. A child who's read 30+ full-length passages on a computer will have closed the gap.

2. Scrolling fatigue and navigation confusion

Long reading passages in Janison often require scrolling. Your child reads paragraph 1, scrolls down, reads paragraph 2, scrolls down. When they get to the question — which asks "what is the main idea of paragraph 2?" — they have to scroll back up to re-read. Then back down to the question. Then back up if the question prompts them to compare paragraphs.

This back-and-forth burns time. Kids who haven't practised develop a scroll-and-lose-place pattern where they have to re-orient every time they return to the passage. Kids who have practised learn to scan more efficiently, use mental bookmarks, and sometimes physically point to their place on screen with a finger (yes, it's allowed) to stay oriented.

None of this is intuitive. It has to be taught.

3. Typed writing under time pressure

This one deserves its own article (and has one — see the Typed Writing post). Short version: a 30-minute writing response on a keyboard requires a typing speed of at least 30 words per minute to produce an appropriate-length response. The average primary-aged child types at roughly 15–20 WPM with no practice. That's a 2x gap, and it shows up directly in mark-scoring writing quality.

Kids who've been taught to handwrite beautifully at school will produce shorter, less-developed writing on a keyboard if they haven't practised typing. The marker doesn't know you're a great handwriter. They only see what's on the screen.

4. On-screen maths working

This one surprises parents. Maths on paper involves scribbling working in the margin. On Janison, your child gets a piece of scratch paper (on exam day) and has to mentally bridge between what's on the screen and what's on their paper. This sounds minor, but for multi-step problems it's cognitively expensive — they're reading the question, transferring numbers mentally, working on paper, then transferring the answer back to click in the box on screen.

Kids who've only practised maths on paper have the whole problem physically in front of them. Kids on Janison are working across two surfaces. If you haven't practised this bridging, multi-step problems take 20–30% longer.

5. Flagging and review strategy

Janison lets your child flag a question for review and come back to it. Good strategy — if a question is taking too long, flag it, move on, return at the end. The problem is most kids have never used a flag-and-review system. They either never flag (and get stuck wasting time on hard questions) or they flag too aggressively (and run out of time to properly address the flagged ones).

The right habit: flag anything that takes more than 90 seconds, move on, return with the remaining time. This takes practice. On a paper exam, kids just put a star next to the question. It's similar in principle but different in muscle memory.

6. Eye strain and stamina over 155 minutes

Full-length Selective exam is 155 minutes on screen — longer if you count transitions. Adult office workers experience real eye fatigue after that kind of continuous screen time. For a 10-year-old who's never sat at a laptop for over an hour, it's genuinely hard. Their focus degrades in the second half of the exam, and the sections at the end (Writing in particular) suffer.

Training stamina matters. Kids who have done 3+ full-length 155-minute mocks don't fatigue the same way. It's a physical adaptation, not just a knowledge one.

How to actually train for the format

Here's what I do with every student preparing for the Selective exam, in order of when I introduce it.

Month 1–2: Build digital literacy

• Typing practice, 15 min/day — free platform like Typing Club, target 30 WPM by end of Month 2.
• Screen reading practice — any online reading platform (Epic!, Storyline Online, Wattpad kids) for 20 minutes/day to build on-screen reading stamina.
• Introduction to Janison-style practice — a handful of short-form questions on a computer, just to normalise the interface.

Month 3–4: Section-specific digital practice

• Full sections on computer under timed conditions — Reading section on screen, Maths on screen, Thinking Skills on screen. Each section separately, not all at once yet.
• Working paper habits — train the child to use their scratch paper efficiently while reading questions on screen.
• Flag-and-review drills — practise the flagging workflow until it's automatic.

Month 5–6: Full-length mocks

• 5–8 full-length 155-minute practice exams on a computer, simulating exam conditions (same time of day if possible, no breaks other than the scheduled ones).
• Error analysis after each mock — not just "what was wrong" but "why was it wrong, and was it a content error or a format error?" Format errors are the ones we specifically target in the final weeks.
• Strategy refinement — what order does this child work best in, how do they pace Reading vs Maths, when do they need to switch focus?

A story that stuck with me

Last year I had a Year 5 student — very strong mathematically, one of the sharpest kids I'd taught in a while. Her family had done two years of paper-based prep at one of the bigger centres. She was regularly scoring in the high 80s on their paper mock tests.

First time I put her on a computer for a timed full-length, she scored 68. Her mum called me the next day, upset, asking what went wrong. I walked through the test with the student and she told me: the Reading section felt "weird" because she couldn't underline things with a pencil, the Maths section was "fine" but she kept losing her place when switching between screen and paper, and the Writing section "ran out of time" because she types slowly.

Ten weeks of focused computer-based practice later, her score on equivalent-difficulty mocks was back in the high 80s. She got into her selective school of choice. But if we hadn't caught the format issue, she would have walked into exam day confident, and walked out devastated.

The exam isn't the same exam on a screen. It's a different exam, and your child needs to train for the actual thing.